New York's Cultural Power Brokers; Mixing the Real Estate Business and Everyone's Pleasure

Every few years the New York cultural world produces a power couple of the moment. By any measure this particular moment belongs to Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley.

She is leading the effort to transform Avery Fisher Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic, as head of the orchestra's real estate committee. He is a driving force in the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, where he is vice chairman.

Gov. George E. Pataki last month asked Mr. Speyer, the president and chief executive of Tishman Speyer Properties, to raise $600 million for a memorial, museum and performing arts center at the World Trade Center site.

He said no, in part because Mr. Speyer and Ms. Farley, a senior managing director at Tishman Speyer, so often say yes.

Mr. Speyer, chairman emeritus of Columbia University, is already leading a campaign to raise $1 billion for New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Ms. Farley is involved in the $325 million reconstruction of West 65th Street and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, where she is on the executive committee. She is also on the boards of Lincoln Center Theater and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

This is the sort of ubiquitous do-gooding that gets noticed in New York, where social, business and philanthropic interests merge in a swirl of boardroom dramas, benefit dinners and opening night galas. Mr. Speyer, 63, and Ms. Farley, 54, say they do not seek the attention; they declined to be interviewed for this article. But they have become bona fide New York royalty. ''Jerry and his wife play a very important role that bridges the business and cultural communities in the city,'' said the financier Felix G. Rohatyn, who together with his wife, Elizabeth, played that role in the 1970's and 80's. ''The city has to continue as a cultural, media and financial capital of the world. To do that you need people who can straddle a couple if not more of these constituencies.''

Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a civic-business organization founded in the 1970's by David Rockefeller, said that Mr. Speyer was scrupulous about separating the various facets of his life.

''Jerry draws the hardest line I've ever seen between his business interests and his philanthropic interests,'' she said. He refused, for example, to help the Partnership lobby Governor Pataki on behalf of a proposal by Goldman Sachs to build a new headquarters in lower Manhattan, because he was involved in Goldman's project.

That is not to say that Mr. Speyer and Ms. Farley hesitate to deploy their connections and expertise on behalf of their cultural interests.

When the Museum of Modern Art wanted to buy the Dorset Hotel on 53rd Street as part of its expansion, Mr. Speyer used his relationship with the owners to persuade them to sell the building for $50 million rather than $75 million.

And because Amec Construction Management, the company responsible for the museum's $858 million renovation, recently said that it would go out of business in two to three years, Mr. Speyer's team has enhanced its oversight of the project.

''Clearly he has a wealth of contacts and experience that is invaluable when you're doing a big building project,'' said Glenn D. Lowry, the museum's director. ''The Museum of Modern Art has no clout in the construction world, has no connection to city planners. Having someone like Jerry on the board makes all the difference.''

The couple's influence notably failed them only once in recent memory, when negotiations last year for a merger of the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall were ultimately unsuccessful.

Ms. Farley and Mr. Speyer were on opposite sides of the table. They are close friends of Sanford I. Weill, the chairman of Carnegie Hall and of Citigroup, and his wife, Joan. Mr. Speyer is on Carnegie Hall's board with Mr. Weill, and the two men and their companies have done business together. Ms. Farley is on the Ailey board with Ms. Weill.

Ms. Farley led the Philharmonic's side in the secret negotiations with Carnegie Hall even as she publicly directed parallel planning for an overhaul of Avery Fisher Hall. That led to questions among some Lincoln Center and Philharmonic board members about her loyalties.

But there is no sign that the abandonment of the merger eroded the couple's standing, a tribute to Mr. Speyer and Ms. Farley's tireless work for various groups and perhaps to the healing power of money, which in their case comes from real estate.

The couple met at Tishman Speyer, where Ms. Farley was hired in 1984. They began dating in 1988, a year after the divorce of Mr. Speyer and Lynne Tishman, whose great-grandfather Julius Tishman founded the realty and construction company that became Tishman Speyer. Mr. Speyer and Ms. Farley were married in 1991. They have a daughter; he has three children from his previous marriage.

Today Tishman Speyer owns or manages 25 million square feet of office space on three continents, a portfolio that in Manhattan includes Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and the Lipstick Building. After selling heavily in the last two years, Mr. Speyer became a buyer early this year, adding $1 billion in properties.

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Ms. Farley, who earned a masters degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1976, has been responsible for starting and managing the company's international real estate activity in Asia and Europe. She is also responsible for global corporate marketing and is chairwoman of the compensation committee.

The couple's home on the Upper East Side, built in 1995 on the site of two razed town houses, has a vast collection of contemporary art. Visitors are given a catalog of what is on the walls. Mr. Speyer bought his first piece of art 40 years ago and has not sold a single item since. His favorite artists include Frank Stella and Jeff Koons.

Ms. Farley finds socializing much easier than does Mr. Speyer, who has told friends that he ''doesn't do warm and cuddly well.'' He resists being honored at dinners, but together the couple are frequently hosts or chairmen of the fund-raising galas that define a certain stratum of New York society.

In the fall of 2002, for example, they were co-chairmen for the opening gala at Carnegie Hall. After a reception and Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert of Ravel and Bizet, Mr. Speyer and Ms. Farley presided over a dinner for 850 at the Waldorf-Astoria that raised $2 million.

Two weeks earlier they were among the biggest givers at the Philharmonic's opening night, an all-Beethoven evening that raised $1.8 million. (In 2000 they shared the chairmanship of the Philharmonic's opening gala).

Tonight they will be co-chairmen of the ''Ailey at the Apollo'' gala in Harlem, their fourth such undertaking for Ailey in the last 18 months.

People tend to bubble about Ms. Farley, who is on the executive committee of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief and resettlement organization; is chairman emeritus of Women in Need, which helps homeless women and children in New York City; and is a vice president of the Brearley School.

Bonnie Stone, the president and chief executive of Women in Need, called Ms. Farley ''the most hard-working person I've ever met.'' Ms. Farley was chairwoman of the organization from 1998 to 2001 and ''transformed this place,'' Ms. Stone said.

Mr. Speyer, meanwhile, has positioned himself above the rough and tumble of the real estate world, a role that has at times put him at odds with his real estate brethren.

While the Real Estate Board of New York actively opposed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's property tax increase last year, for example, Mr. Speyer and the Partnership for New York City supported it. Today Mr. Speyer and the Partnership favor Mr. Bloomberg's plan to give middle-class homeowners a $400 tax rebate, while the Real Estate Board opposes it.

Some people say that Mr. Speyer comes closest to being his generation's David Rockefeller. The two men have been friends since 1982, when Mr. Speyer joined the board of the Modern, where Mr. Rockefeller is chairman. They are now partners in the ownership of Rockefeller Center.

All the circles of Mr. Speyer's life connected in 1997, when he was one of the finalists in the hotly contested bidding for the Chrysler Building.

The negotiations involved a tricky two-step process of buying the property from a bank and working out a new lease with Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, which owned the land beneath the Art Deco landmark on 42nd Street. The school, which desperately needed cash, had made it clear that it would accept nothing less than $4.5 million a year.

Using a combination of social connections and aggressive bargaining, Mr. Speyer outmaneuvered the other bidders with a phone call to the chairman of Cooper Union, Robert A. Bernhard. Mr. Bernhard, a friend of the Tishman family, said he and Mr. Speyer had known each other for years. They were both members of the Century Country Club in Purchase, N.Y., and shared an interest in the arts.

''Speyer called me up and said, 'If we guarantee you $5.5 million, will you give us an exclusive for 60 days?' '' Mr. Bernhard recalled. ''He did, and he now manages the building. Another bidder was very irritated with me. But Jerry took an aggressive point of view, and nobody else came forward with anything like that.''

The couple demonstrate that same kind of aggressiveness on behalf of the arts.

Last summer Deborah Warner, the British director, wanted to use an upper floor of the Chrysler Building as the final vista in her ''Angel Project,'' a theatrical walking tour of New York that was the opening event of the Lincoln Center Festival. But a tenant was in the way.

Ms. Farley went to Mr. Speyer, and Mr. Speyer found the tenant other quarters for the run of the performance.

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A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2004, on Page E00001 of the National edition with the headline: New York's Cultural Power Brokers; Mixing the Real Estate Business and Everyone's Pleasure. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe